Who Says Laughter’s the Best Medicine?

By JAN HOFFMAN

December 19, 2013

Just in time to protect patients from the dangers of holiday cheer, a new scholarly review from a British medical journal describes many harmful effects wrought by laughter.

Among the alarms it sounds: The force of laughing can dislocate jaws, prompt asthma attacks, cause headaches, make hernias protrude. It can provoke cardiac arrhythmia, syncope or even emphysema (this last, according to a clinical lecturer in 1892).

And ponder, briefly, the mortifying impact of sustained laughter on the urinary tract (detailed in a 1982 The Lancet paper entitled “Giggle Incontinence”).

At the very least, the new review could be considered an affirmation for the perpetually dour. If 2013 was the year of the worried well, the authors imply that 2014 is poised to be the year of the humorless healthy.

Last spring the co-authors, Dr. Robin E. Ferner, an honorary professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Birmingham, and Jeffrey K. Aronson, a fellow in clinical pharmacology at Oxford, who study the benefits and harms of medicines, discussed what benefit-harm they could explore in a gambit to win a coveted berth in BMJ’s Christmas issue. According to Dr. Delamothe, BMJ receives nearly 120 submissions and accepts about 30.

Dr. Ferner and Dr. Aronson considered holiday foods, for example, but their tastes were not in concert. “He likes sweet wines and I like dry wines,” Dr. Ferner explained. Then they found common cause: ”But we both like dry humor.”

They winnowed down the papers that mentioned laughter to 785, putting them into three categories: benefits (85), harms (114) and conditions causing pathological laughter (586).

The question was timely, they argue, because BMJ had not addressed laughter in a serious fashion in over a century. In 1898, it had published a case study of heart failure in a 13-year-old girl following prolonged laughter. The next year, the laughter problem was raised again, when an editorial writer, in response to an Italian doctor’s suggestion that telling jokes could treat bronchitis, dismissively proposed the term “gelototherapy” (Gelos was the Greek god of laughter; in Italian, gelato is ice cream.).

Laughter as therapy was slow to gain traction: in 1928, The Journal of the American Medical Association gave short shrift to Dr. James J. Walsh’s book, “Laughter and Health.”

The harms, however, have been scrutinized. A 1997 discussion of Boerhaave’s syndrome, a spontaneous perforation of the esophagus, a rare though potentially lethal event, mentioned that one unusual precipitating cause is laughter.

Then there is the mysterious Pilgaard-Dahl syndrome, identified in a 2010 article as a pneumothorax in middle-aged male smokers induced by laughter. It takes its name from Ulf Pilgaard and Lisbet Dahl, the Danish revue performers.

“I don’t think of the Danes as uproariously funny,” Dr. Ferner said, “and, having seen their show on YouTube, I still don’t, though, of course, I don’t speak Danish.”

There were other respiratory threats occasioned by laughter, he said. The popping of alveoli (the air sacs in the lungs, which together typically contain about 600 million): “If you’re going to make asthmatics laugh heartily,” Dr. Ferner said, “they might want to have an inhaler by their side.” (This, extrapolated from a 1936 experiment on the mechanism of laughter in asthmatics.)

There are choking hazards, such as ingesting food during belly laughs.

Indeed medical clowning has been observed and embraced. But one study left Dr. Ferner almost speechless. A 2011 fertility study reported that when a clown dressed as a chef de cuisine entertained would-be mothers for 12 to 15 minutes after in vitro fertilization and embryo transfers, the pregnancy rate was 36 percent, compared with 20 percent among a control group that was not entertained.

“Why a chef de cuisine?” Dr. Ferner asked plaintively.

Despite such a comprehensive look at the medical literature on laughter, Dr. Ferner felt there was still territory to be charted. “We don’t know how much laughter is safe,” he said. “There’s probably a U-shaped curve: laughter is good for you, but enormous amounts are bad, perhaps. It’s not a problem in England.”

Nonetheless, if you choose to peruse the MIRTH study or others in BMJ’s Christmas issue, the risk of outbursts of laughter, ranging from snickers to groans to guffaws, could be perilously high. You have been warned.